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mobile wallets

2017 has been a record-breaking year for retail, and not in a good way.

Under pressure from a number of factors, including the growth of ecommerce, brick and mortar retailers have closed thousands of stores this year and some, including big names like Toys R Us, Sears Canada and Payless, have filed for bankruptcy.

Perhaps before long we’ll all be more comfortable ‘buying with Google’ on mobile websites and apps.

The payment industry itself seems to be shaping up for a leap forward, with its leading conference opting for a rebrand. After 15 years as the Mobile Financial Services & NFC Summit the event has been renamed as the Mobile Wallet & Retail Innovation event in 2014.

This change reflects the slow clarification of what has been a bit of a curate’s egg until now. Confusion around NFC and smartphone hardware, as well as just what it is that the consumer wants, has distracted from exciting potential of the mobile wallet as a tool to buy on mobile websites.

In 2013, merchant-specific payment apps were arguably more successful than broader mobile payment solutions. The Starbucks app is regularly cited as one of the biggest successes thus far, used for 10% of all transactions and providing the customer with an experience enhanced by rewards. The point being, the customer wants more than just quicker payment.

Will the future of payments belong to upstart innovators like Square? As mobile payments become a larger and larger part of the global payments industry, they just might.

But payment giants like VeriFone aren’t sitting idly by either. At this week’s National Retail Federation’s Convention and Expo in New York, the company, whose point-of-sale systems are used by countless businesses, will be demonstrating how it plans to keep up with rapidly evolving payment technologies.

There are anticipated technologies that, despite capturing the imagination of technophiles, analysts and journalists, seem to just never arrive as soon as one expects or hope.

Mobile commerce and mobile wallets are good examples. Year after year, the vision and ambition are strong but the execution and usage is weak. However, there are a number of reasons to expect that 2011 is the year that a tipping point in the use of mobile phones as the ultimate shopping enabler becomes reality.